2009-11-13 OpenBSD (macppc)

I made the last backup of my iBook Alpinobombus and installed OpenBSD/macppc on it. Burn the install46.iso image onto a CD, insert into iBook, hold c while booting.

=> macppc

The wireless network needs some sort of firmware which I downloaded from the net and saved on an USB stick. See man bwi for the location. Anyway, now I needed to get the package from the stick onto the laptop.

I don’t understand why i is relevant, but this ¹ worked:

=> ¹

mount -t msdos /dev/sd0i /mnt/stick

I kept trying sd0a… 😢

I added the following line to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sd0i /mnt/stick msdos rw,noauto 0 0

I hope mount /mnt/stick will work from now on.

Back to the network! With pkg_add bwi-firmware-1.4.tgz finally available I installed the firmware for the Airport wireless card in my old iBook. 👌

Use ifconfig to verify that bwi0 is your wireless interface. Use ifconfig bwi0 scan to list the networks available and find yours.

Now the WPA stuff for my Schroeder network…

ifconfig bwi0 nwid Schroeder wpa wpapsk `wpa-psk Schroeder "*secret*"`
ifconfig bwi0 up
dhclient bwi0

And it seems to work. I can ping www.google.com – win! 😄

Thus, I removed any /etc/hostname.* files that didn’t work and created a single /etc/hostname.bwi0 file containing the following line:

dhcp nwid Schroeder wpa wpapsk `wpa-psk Schroeder "*secret*"`

I’m surprised it works!

Tomorrow:

1. fixing the keymap layout – kbd -l lists de and others, but no Swiss German layout → update 💡 Apparently sg stands for Swiss German! 😄

2. setting up ports, getting Emacs ← very important! ;)

3. setting up email

4. Much later... Firefox?

=> Swiss German layout

Luckily I’ve used US keyboards before, and I’ve used vi before. 👌

Second Day

=> http://openbsd.org/faq/faq7.html#Keyboard wsconsctl

Apparently there are no virtual terminals because there’s no VGA card, but there’s an alternative to GNU screen: tmux.

=> http://openbsd.org/faq/faq7.html#tmux tmux

I realized that there are two levels of packages: 1. binary packages 2. the ports system. I started by setting

PKG_PATH=ftp://mirror.switch.ch/pub/OpenBSD/4.6/packages/machine -a/:ftp://ftp.wu-wien.ac.at/pub/OpenBSD/4.6/packages/machine -a/:ftp://ftp.OpenBSD.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.6/packages/machine -a/